The Cost of Trust in the Dynamics of Best Attachment

The need of trust is growing in several contexts as e-commerce, virtual communities, distributed on-line services and many others as an essential precautionary component for users during interactions with strangers, either other people or virtual agents. Generally trust metrics endorse the principle "the higher the trust, the more legitimate that user will be''; a consequence is that getting trusted must require some effort, otherwise all participants would easily achieve high trustworthiness. In this work we study how a user can achieve and preserve a good trust and what costs it requires over time; we also investigate some heuristics that allow reducing the complexity in exploring the rank-effort space especially for large networks

Network robustness improvement via long-range links

Abstract Many systems are today modelled as complex networks, since this representation has been proven being an effective approach for understanding and controlling many real-world phenomena. A significant area of interest and research is that of networks robustness, which aims to explore to what extent a network keeps working when failures occur in its structure and how disruptions can be avoided. In this paper, we introduce the idea of exploiting long-range links to improve the robustness of Scale-Free (SF) networks. Several experiments are carried out by attacking the networks before and after the addition of links between the farthest nodes, and the results show that this approach effectively improves the SF network correct functionalities better than other commonly used strategies

An Intelligent and Pervasive Surveillance System for Home Security

Domotics is a promising area for intelligent and pervasive applications that aims at achieving a better quality of life. Harnessing modern technologies is valuable in many contexts, in particular in home surveillance scenario, where people safety or security might be threatened. Modern home security systems endorse monitoring as well as control functions in a remote fashion, e.g. via devices as a laptops, PDAs, or cell phones, thus implementing the pervasive computing paradigma; moreover, the intelligence is now often embedded into modern applications, e.g. surveillance systems could adapt to the environment through a self-learning algorithm. This work presents an intelligent and pervasive surveillance system for home and corporate security based on the ZigBee protocol which detects and classifies intrusions discarding false positives, also providing remote control and cameras live streaming. Results of tests in different environments show the effectiveness of the proposed system

Multisource agent-based healthcare data gathering

The number and type of digital sources storing healthcare data is increasing more and more, rising the problem of collecting actually dispersed information about a single patient. In this paper we propose an agent-based system to support integration of health-related data extracted from both structured (HIS) and semi-structured (websites and social networks) sources. Integrated data are exported in HL7 format to finally feed personal health record (PHR)

Medical prescription classification: a NLP-based approach

The digitization of healthcare data has been consolidated in the last decade as a must to manage the vast amount of data generated by healthcare organizations. Carrying out this process effectively represents an enabling resource that will improve healthcare services provision, as well as on-the-edge related applications, ranging from clinical text mining to predictive modelling, survival analysis, patient similarity, genetic data analysis and many others. The application presented in this work concerns the digitization of medical prescriptions, both to provide authorization for healthcare services or to grant reimbursement for medical expenses. The proposed system first extract text from scanned medical prescription, then Natural Language Processing and machine learning techniques provide effective classification exploiting embedded terms and categories about patient/doctor personal data, symptoms, pathology, diagnosis and suggested treatments. A REST ful Web Service is introduced, together with results of prescription classification over a set of 800K+ of diagnostic statements

A Social Inspired Broker for M2M Protocols

Internet of things can be viewed as the shifting from a network of computers to a network of things.To support M2M communication, several protocols have been developed; many of them are endorsed by client-broker model with a publish-subscribe interaction mechanism. In this paper we introduce a multi broker solution where the network of brokers is inspired by social relationships. This allow data sharing among several IoT systems, leads to a reliable and effective query forwarding algorithm and the small world effect coming from mimic humans relations guarantees fast responses and good query recall

Tall Cell Variant versus Conventional Papillary Thyroid Carcinoma: A Retrospective Analysis in 351 Consecutive Patients

Background: The aim of this retrospective study was to investigate clinical and pathological characteristics of the tall cell variant of papillary thyroid carcinoma compared to conventional variants. Methods: The clinical records of patients who underwent surgical treatment between 2009 and 2015 were analyzed. The patients were divided into two groups: those with a histopathological diagnosis of tall cell papillary carcinoma were included in Group A, and those with a diagnosis of conventional variants in Group B. Results: A total of 35 patients were included in Group A and 316 in Group B. All patients underwent total thyroidectomy. Central compartment and lateral cervical lymph node dissection were performed more frequently in Group A (42.8% vs. 18%, p = 0.001, and 17.1% vs. 6.9%, p = 0.04). Angiolymphatic invasion, parenchymal invasion, extrathyroidal extension, and lymph node metastases were more frequent in Group A, and the data reached statistical significance. Local recurrence was more frequent in Group A (17.1% vs. 6.3%, p = 0.02), with two patients (5.7%) in Group A showing visceral metastases, whereas no patient in Group B developed metastatic cancer (p = 0.009). Conclusions: Tall cell papillary carcinoma is the most frequent aggressive variant of papillary thyroid cancer. Tall cell histology represents an independent poor prognostic factor compared to conventional variants